Curbed Homepage

In March 2017, my team at Vox Media relaunched the homepage of our real-estate news brand Curbed on our new homepage product.

This project dates back to last August, when we sought to understand the value of a homepage today and how it should serve audiences, editorial teams, and advertisers. After an extensive research phase, we created a new homepage system that would serve as the baseline product upon which all of our eight brands’ websites (more than 350 separate sites in total) would be built. The new homepage product enables fast discovery of new content, helps brands to feel distinct, and most importantly, allows us to evolve the design over time in accordance with user behavior.

In November, we launched our first brand, The Verge, on the new homepage product. Since then, we’ve been able to test whether our assumptions about the new homepage were accurate, and apply the findings to our second brand to launch on the product—Curbed. We explored changes in information architecture, layout, experience, content strategy, and how Curbed’s existing design language could be better reflected on platform. The result is a homepage refresh that feels fresh but familiar.

Curbed is just one part of the puzzle—we are currently in the midst of moving the rest of our brands’ homepages onto the new homepage product. Look for more on that process soon!